The experience of engaging with the television show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is structurally and affectively analogous to the experience of an alternate reality game. The community presents multiple tiers of engagement in which individual contributions can be recognized; the creators of the show include material with the specific intent that it be taken up by the community but without any control of the way in which it is used, and material created by the community is folded into the text by the creators in a dialogue. The context of the cocreative dialogue that surrounds the show and its community is a good example of both what Paul Booth identifies as a digi-gratis economy and the forensic fandom used by Jason Mittell to understand community engagement and response to Lost.
The Christchurch Call was an international collaborative pledge between nation states and online service providers "to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online." In this article, we set out to provide an integrated cross-disciplinary analysis of the implications of the limitations of the Christchurch Call. We argue the existence of the Call helped change the conversation on the role played by online communication in hate, harassment and terrorism. However, the Christchurch Call is limited in its ability to counter online hate and extremism. Its current policy framework is most likely to produce messaging that shields social media platforms and other key figures from their existing responsibilities in producing insecurity on and offline. In particular, it does not address the wicked problem of how to understand the social, communal and individual dynamics when the online expression of free speech turns to hate, and in turn, violence-together with the role platforms and states play in permitting and intervening in such digital interactions.
The experience of videogames is distinct from other forms of mediated storytelling because the person playing the game can come to feel responsible for events and characters within a fictional world due to dynamics within what Brendan Keogh calls the 'messy, hybrid assemblage' of videogame play:Games function through modes of engagement where people need to make decisions and take actions in order to proceed through a hybrid text, in a context that the player is affectively invested in, and which is personally relevant to both the player and their situation. A perception of responsibility grows out of that agency, since the player's decisions have a meaningful impact on a world and characters that they already invested in treating as if they were real.
Homestuck is a textual and experiential chameleon that manipulates its own structure to shape the audience’s affective experience of the story by mimicking not just the storytelling techniques of other media forms, but their modes of engagement as well. This article introduces terminology to illustrate how and why the online serial Homestuck qualifies as a distinctive form of storytelling. I introduce the term transmodal engagement to illustrate how Homestuck uses the affective, experiential affordances of different media forms to sculpt and shape the experience of the text in completely different ways to ‘transmedia’ storytelling. The second term this article introduces is metamedia storytelling, which describes how the audience’s familiarity with storytelling across multiple media forms can be used to manipulate their experience of fiction. Homestuck deploys metamedia storytelling to continually destabilize the reader’s understanding of the text and their investments in the storyworld by forcing re-evaluations of not just what is happening, but what kind of mediated relationship the readers have with the content of the story.
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